ASHLEY GARRETT

TAROT IMAGES

with poems by

Billie Chernicoff, Lila Dunlap, Robert Kelly, and Tamas Panitz

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Ashley Garrett

TAROT IMAGES

with poems by Billie Chernicoff, Lila Dunlap,

Robert Kelly, and Tamas Panitz

Metambesen Annandale-on-Hudson

2019

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Tarot Images is the fifty-fifth

in a series of texts and chapbooks published by Metambesen.

The reader is free to download and print it

without charge or permission.

Images copyright © 2019 by Ashley Garrett Poems copyright © 2019 by Billie Chernicoff, Lila Dunlap,

Robert Kelly, and Tamas Panitz

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THE ASTONISHING TAROTS OF ASHLEY GARRETT

The best advice, instruction, on the use of Tarot cards I’ve ever heard was offered by the poet Stephen Jonas. Through the kindness of Gerrit Lansing, I had come to know Jonas, and one evening in the mid 1960s was present at one of his Tarot sessions; he was talking with the remarkable Carol Weston. He told her: Look at the card and remember.

Remember. Putting it all together – how this image, never seen before perhaps, would (by the hypothesis of magical incarnation that rules cartomancy) suddenly rouse in you awareness of processes and practices germane to the moment, your moment. You look and you remember. You remember what you never knew, see again what you have never seen.

When I walked into the light-fueled huge studio she shares with Brian Wood (whose fierce contemplative paintings I continue to write about), I saw on Ashley Garrett’s side of the space a table laid out with what seemed half a hundred of the most potent Tarot images I have ever seen. Not one was a conventional Tarot image, not one in fact was a representational image at all. What they were was an astonishing array of small abstract paintings that worked, instanter, on the mind the way Tarots are supposed to work, summoning from the less available parts of our conscious abrupt visions of order and process. I dared not look closely at too many of them or the sunny afternoon with these new friends would have vanished into trance and silence. I picked up one or two, and each one spoke to me.

Immediately I wanted these cards, all of them that I could see, to be made into a book or a deck, a book that would collect these new and potent images and give them to a society much in need of news from the interior.

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For these cards of hers, and I have no idea whether anything like that was her intention or in her mind at all, these images are the new Tarots, not smirched by too much commentary, unsoiled by the way the Tarots have been coopted in story and film, or trapped in occultist orthodoxies. These are the brand-new images of the oldest world. And we will use them both for delight, as with any pictures (we are children who love pictures) and for the profound researches into the self that the dear old Tarots have given us for centuries. You can see more images on Garrett’s website: https://www.ashleygarrett.com/

—Robert Kelly

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The Decision Am I man or angel? One arm, one wing, my heart already a rose, genitals swollen, thigh fleshy, eye open. Not my mouth, but mind wakes, something soft and fast happens like doves. Are they words? Are they my words? Now they’re gone. Either way, I can see I’ll be lonely. Either way, I’m likely to fall. To decide is to cut,

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a violence. Better to wait till there’s no need. Better to flap and flail and not know. Ask anyone, ask me. You enchant me. Do nothing. —Billie Chernicoff

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The Pool It’s true I hid this pool just as I hid myself in it, lifting my dress and wading in, knowing it would excite you. I hid it in the woods of your recurring dream in its own vortex under its own torrent, water I sang over falling for its orchids, bracken and pine, the not so innocent perfume of our happy narcissism, an outdoorsy dream with birds and flowers

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mistaking each other for laughter. Now I see I was disclosing by concealing this pool, this card, myself, and that feels right, doesn’t it? That’s one way, a good way. Blessed secrets. Still, I imagine Artemis rising naked for once into the light, letting anyone see. That’s a good way too. —Billie Chernicoff

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The Oxbow A river lost in thought like Lao Tzu, the court astrologer who gave up his post and abandoned the past as well as the future, those twin addictions, to go where he liked, like water, a koan. You can see him here, a fool at home on the edge of an abyss,

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not dark or terrible, quite another country, of citrine light and meadow flowers, Queen Anne’s Lace, the white of paper, each umbel with its single tiny dark purple mole, its just off-center, virginal floret. Did I say meadow or island? Or star that fell through his mother’s gaze to conceive him. They say she labored under a plum tree, and there are a few visible here, rosy smudges from above. Lao Tzu was born an old man with a white beard and here he sits under a plum tree, still on the way. He has the black hat of an errant rabbi, or the center of a wild flower you knew as a girl and still know, but I digress, I stray, and so should you. —Billie Chernicoff

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The Mollusk A metaphor for salt, wisdom, wet fleshy wit, see the man in the boat? The woodwose, priest, green ordinary man who weeps leaves and leaves. See its mouth and heart, the anal rose, a breathing

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figure of speech, the labial tent, proscenium of the mysterium. Why did you come, is that your question? The sea is your lover, no need for else. Selfish shellfish, no advice. Clitoral, literal, liturgical, I could have called this Pleasure or Coming, nothing like anything, no advice. —Billie Chernicoff

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The Vineyard You will inherit a chateau whose terroir is identical almost to heaven, a mirror image. The only road is the sun, drifting through the old vines and green declivities where you hesitate as if you could choose. The vigneron pours you a glass of the near

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black wine of your estate, tasting of smoke and seedy fruit. He wants you to do as you please. How slow the bees are in this warmth. When you crouch in the lavender a motherless ecstasy bears you down to an even more physical world. How you love things, in sun or shadow. That’s all I see, Kore. No one hurt or lost, no scorpion on the sill. —Billie Chernicoff

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The Mountain Goat Properly mountain nymph, not goat at all, above the tree line, beyond salt. Go to a high place, alone. Cast off the mean and pretty things people say. Lie down like a child in the snow and close your misread eyes. There.

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Let the sun gild your horns, your dreams dream themselves. Or might you need salt? As a salt subject you may feel lost, even unloved. In that case Natrum Muriaticum is your remedy, a week at the beach. —Billie Chernicoff

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Sovereignty He rubs the earth as a lamp, summons himself, djinn of his native clay. The mist of his will, woody, resinous, hot, grassy, acquires limbs, torso, tongue. Born whole from a clod or a single bee, from any one of a thousand darknesses,

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Africa, neither symbol nor subject of its congeries, he is its own shape, its language and king. —Billie Chernicoff

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The Sun Love is not what you think. Rhythmic chaotic origin of “the.” The drama in heaven. Face to face with the first things. Above all, color. Close your eyes, you’ll see. —Billie Chernicoff

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The Obstacle It’s my job as well as my pleasure to remove obstacles from your throat, your ear, all your flight paths and allées. To that end I become each obstacle – the cloud in your eye, stone in your shoe, your fear of snakes,

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fear of falling. Neither mother nor lover you never had, though I do love you in my way, as you must love me in yours. I’m the obstacle. When I step aside trees part for you, mirrors open like doors. Also called the teacher you can see I’m nothing but a blue sky with a rose in its mouth. — Billie Chernicoff

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Hungry girls need to eat even if it means this cactus. Yum, prickly floral, rouge and rogue maroon sideburns on starkly stern gentleman of the desert red rust bust underneath his low shoulder, carrying little but his beans and clean air.

—Lila Dunlap

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Big fist make little difference, said the fish to the ruined submarine. Kiss my kelp, touch my mine, where the rusted spines of this vintage bomb talk to the tickling barnacles when you dive down to find sharks or treasure. The ghosts of dead sailors dance drunk with anemones reddish-coloured rainbows just out of light of the shallows. —Lila Dunlap

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The road blows bran

misted memory of vineyards

at the close of October

I can’t help but think of Van Gogh’s

twisted Wheatfield with Crows,

or so I remember,

the last dance before death

(for both the artist and the land)

a girl in a brown dress

empties grain onto the earth

its own winter soup

thick and meaty

rich with oil and complete starches

as rainbow and ruinous

as vaginal fluid

dripping after a rainstorm.

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— Lila Dunlap

Big blue blustery solid

genital rush.

This is a solid expulsion

via which we view the organ.

She shows us how deep

we need to go

to reach her manhood.

She keeps a little bit of sand

in the corner of her room.

And a leggy red bird

spreads its wings

right at the fulcrum

where she opens her legs.

Meanwhile Amazonian black ants

trickle out from inside her

willingly.

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— Lila Dunlap

Our bubbling fades to reverence and we gratefully stand at attention ready to kill or give birth to our god, see him wash up unspoken of on the sand. Ask me was the water blue or grey that day, was the sand of coral or glass? Face-down we worship you, strenuous as our worship is, make us a cult for you, and we rub down our temple with blood, our window frames with lead paint, and look to the larger sea that awaits us, across that thin and whistling bridge.

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— Lila Dunlap

Begins with rose, ends with a leap, End me, cries the Heavens, see me splatter. He adds his hands to the apple, and we find ourselves soaring fast through the firmament. Nothing happens but creation. Watch the world work, being everything inside its orgasm. —Lila Dunlap

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A blue swivel, an Inuit child asleep in his blankets of fur. Outside the night rages on, as unannounced and wild as any city. Flocks of lantern-bearing or lantern-headed ghosts prance by, outside on the snow. Nearby, an eel sleeps, pulsing, his belly full of food, and beyond this mess of broadness and particularity the sky makes its way to a hazy morning. — Lila Dunlap

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A Christmas of who or what has never seen the light (as all Christmases are). The wolf on spider legs salutes the rising red and howls as best he can. Some snot escapes through his teeth, and he can see that it is green. Upward white Christmas trees dash and dance: Spruce and Fir we are! Yule-logs to be set on fire by our Lord. And God like a flaming Ferris-wheel having buried one son bears another and the demon turns his dark cloak to cover his dirty blue face. —Lila Dunlap

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The holiday cake is round. The celebratory bread. Babka, king cake, gallette du rois, a holy circle, (all but the Yule log, not Christian at all). And here you can see the brandied cherries studding the sun, shielding our eyes from our God while the fuzzy blue sky bubbles with the help of this warmth ripples like silk in springtime ecstasy. So round and round the ladies dance,

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the girls of our village, feet in the dirty grass immune to filth, elevating the cake, the coin, the loop, the face which looks back at the heavens and recognizes it as such. —Lila Dunlap

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Under the water the wretched fish of the deep cannot aptly celebrate the birth of our Lord, but they do their best. They swim fast in a circle and maintain between them a sprig of Christmas vegetation dotted with berries and tied with ribbons to complete their undersea wreath. I don’t know what to think of this tradition. It is said that when our Christ was born, at that same moment the cat Christ, and dog Christ, and giraffe Christ, and crab Christ were also born, each according to his species. That being said, my grandma also told me that: “A fish isn’t an animal,” so it is hard to pass judgment on this one. —Lila Dunlap

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Little dance moths do during the day -light hours, a book of hours is the very progression of the sun as we see it from our gardens. The text is the squashes fattened on the vine. Healthy cucurbits mumbling psalms in late afternoon. A blue bird lands on the sprout of a pumpkin suddenly weightless in this quiet wind of paradise, a walled garden, aware and looking at itself and all else surrounded by night beyond the wall

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and the dusky rhythms of the jittering blood within the dancers exchanging their skin with one another and the cosmos make this brightness possible. —Lila Dunlap

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I held the world in my hand and had no hands. I gave it to you and you weren’t there. This is the dream of the Giant, the liberal answer to unasked questions. When you see this image you know you’re safe, it holds you in its hands and it has hands, it builds a church

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out of sticks and stones, brings you into it, marries you there. When you see this image you know you are complete. Things have happened already. Be quiet and dream what comes. This is Alpha and Omega and the naked man who carries them into the world. Some call him the Redeemer, but he buys nothing back. All he does is give. And what he gives I think is us. —Robert Kelly

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The hands of God hold ripeness only when we reach up. There is a kind of flower that knows this better than I do but I can’t find it growing anywhere. Maybe the subway. Maybe under the river Though I think it grows on my mother’s grave. Everything is far away but God. The young Gypsy woman who drew this image quickly on the palm of my hand called it The Sound you can Actually Hold Onto. And when you do, the flower comes to you. It feels like the skin of her knee or yours and the color keeps changing the way you do too. —Robert Kelly

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The Dark Decider lives in our minds. When we think this way and that the Decider decides and we live with it. When you draw this card put everything out of mind. Maybe allow yourself to recall a stream flowing past some trees. Don’t name them. Don’t care if there are fish in the water

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or lovely beings bathing there or earnest Baptists at their play. Hear the water ripple. Nothing has to be decided, does it? You’re who you are, where you are, and the stream keeps going away.

—Robert Kelly

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Sometimes the swan turns round and swims towards the beginning. This is The Beginning. Swans don’t swim. This is how the world looked last night over the Catskills as the world was beginning. Swans walk through the water, bodies a-float, legs paddling unseen, what the great neglected Eddison called “the policy of the duck.” This is not the duck and not the swan, this is only one bird, the bird called Beginning, that flew over the river last night, that flew a few million years ago over Eden. Which I think was Egypt, which Cain my ancestor left and moved east to the land of Nod, the very place my mother sent me every night. But that was before the beginning.

—Robert Kelly `

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THE KISS What else could come so close and curve around you inside and out, a tyrant tongue around your breath and such soft closures on your lips. And a kiss is never red, despite childish images. Once you’ve been Really kissed you know a kiss is blue as Achilles hair, or black as your insides at night, in bed, bargaining with kisses or whatever

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old poetry guessed that people did when everybody in the dark is Cupid and the only light is the quick excitement engulfing all your lips. —Robert Kelly

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The beasts who carry our flesh-colored star on their greenish fur —midnight paved with olivine, an emerald lake, treasure to find and never return— the beasts I ride are daemons of books and friends who cross our ample world the beasts must not and not not believe in. Read. Beasts we ride across the green text, tabula smaragdina. Ride them to the star their flesh holds buried, purple tinged bow and arrow

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in the hands of The Hunter, earthly Tammuz; The Star, this star, must steal from her brother: turn outward.

—Tamas Panitz